Ariel wrote:<snip>
So, since I can't seem to sleep yet again... (Sorry this got a bit big)
1. You seem to be conflating the issues of abiogenesis and natural selection, but then, so has everyone else on the thread. I'll assume you dispute both.
On abiogenesis:
-I remember the numbers being debated somewhere in the first 10 or 20 pages of this thread. Estimates varied, but I remember a point being raised (by someone who actually knew biology) that it's not simply mashing random chemicals together - there are processes involved that reduce the odds. My belief on this is that we don't have enough information to know the numbers within any less than several orders of magnitude, but that it is physically possible and the odds are low enough that at least one planet is likely to have this occur somewhere in the lifetime of the universe. (And anyway, if it
hadn't occurred in this universe, we wouldn't be around to observe...) It's certainly possible that some other being could have consciously created life, but we don't have any evidence pointing to this being's existence or involvement. Find some, or eliminate all possible natural causes, and I'll consider it.
On natural selection:
-I can only assume you were misled by extremists while researching abiogenesis, because pretty much everything you have on this is false.
-Yes, the vast majority of mutations are unhelpful or even harmful. No, not all of them are. Natural selection is
slow. Positive mutations will gradually appear and take hold.
-Your Smith and Sullivan quote is deceptive. In the short term, mutations may have only a small effect on an organism's chances of survival and reproduction. Over the long term, positive mutations will (by virtue of making their possessors even
slightly more likely to reproduce) tend to spread.
-Those "backward steps" are just the unhelpful mutations mentioned earlier. If they are less effective than the species baseline, they will not be selected for and will make no change overall. They don't set the species as a whole back in any way.
-Complex systems can arise in small steps, each of which is neutral, or beneficial in a different way. I think this was mentioned earlier, but I won't blame you if you don't bother digging for it.
-In general, natural selection works, and has been proven to work. In the real world, as well as computer simulations. If natural selection didn't work, the entire field of evolutionary algorithms wouldn't exist. Really, natural selection is more of a law of probability than a scientific theory at this point.
2. I suppose you came to the right person to stress-test that argument - a Computer Science major. Let's see...
-Order does not require design. It does require
rules, and those rules are usually designed. When setting up an evolutionary algorithm, you specify the rules. In real life, the rules are the universe's fundamental laws, or follow from those. We have no way to tell if those rules were purposefully designed, though.
-I was never taught that rule or anything like it. It's true that most of the code we work with is designed by humans. Not all of it, though - evolutionary algorithms can produce working code, and even complex functionality, with no human input save for the initial rules. Also, fundamentally, each program is just a single number, applied to certain hardware and software.
-No, we can't replicate the information density of DNA yet. We don't have molecular assemblers. Our cells do. Within a century, we should have machines that can do it.
-Working in base 4 is not fundamentally different from working in base 2, or any other base. It might end up more size-efficient for storing information, but at the cost of more complex decoding. There's a reason we only work in base 2 (well, aside from the fact that the majority of numbers being processed are either 0 or 1 anyway).
-Perfectly engineered? Most of our DNA is a complete mess. Some of it is only used as a buffer; some of it is bits of ancient viruses; some, we don't know if it does anything at all.To continue the computer metaphors, it's 750 megabytes of Assembly generated by one of those evolutionary algorithms I mentioned, some of which is around 30 years old, some of which is new, some of which depends on undocumented external libraries, none of which is commented, and at least one bit of which used to be the ILOVEYOU virus. It shouldn't work at all, and if a human had created it they would be fired on the spot. But it does work, somehow, so we get by and gradually try to understand it.
-Self-healing and self-replicating code is simple. Write some code, save it to a file, set up checksums (say, via
Hamming code). The code will copy the file it was executed from, use the checksums to verify and fix it, generate checksums for the new file, and execute it. Any virus or malware on the internet has at least the self-replicating bit down.
3. You're using the word "faith" in its usual context of "belief without evidence", correct? However, the scientific community (and the scientific method) are designed around evidence. They minimize the need for "faith" as much as possible. Scientists are peer-reviewed - their competence is certified, their papers are checked, and their experiments are published to be replicated. If we don't like their work, we can test it ourselves. I don't have to take natural selection on faith - I can go to
BoxCar 2D and watch it happen. I have less confidence in my beliefs about natural abiogenesis, but I have not encountered a better explanation (no, proposing a supernatural force that deliberately formed and protected life, but who we cannot otherwise detect or communicate with, is not "better" - it is more complex than natural abiogenesis, and no more useful).
On the cosmos: again, order does not require design. It simply requires rules, like gravity, electromagnetism, and the nuclear forces. Everything else is emergent. If you want to say the universe was created by a deity, go ahead; I haven't got any evidence for anything that happened before the Big Bang, so I can't choose between hypotheses. Once it formed, everything we see formed via those rules. It is natural, wild, and glorious; it need not be designed.
EDIT: Apparently the board's server restarts at 7 am Eastern. Now that, I would have been happier not knowing...
First though, you need to look at the word evil as used in that translation of the scripture. If you go back to the ancient Hebrew text, there is no equivalent of the English word “evil”, the Hebrew word ra’ can be translated as bad, gloomy, ugly, evil, calamitous, malignant, and envious. It depends on the context of the scripture. Some translations have the scripture saying, “Forming light and creating darkness, making peace and creating calamity.” But evil, calamity, it still means the same thing, and yes God created it. He did so when the first human parents rebelled against him, and he brought down calamity or evil upon them. He did this in the form of casting them out of the Garden of Eden, and not protecting them from old age and death. So is that evil? His enforcing of the penalty for sin, which is basically, death, is an evil, (or calamity) for humans. But this doesn’t mean evil is synonymous with wrongdoing. For example some of the evils or calamities created by God are the Flood of Noah’s day and the Ten Plagues visited upon Egypt. But these evils were not wrongs. Because these were acts of justice against wrongdoers was involved in both cases
